The All-New 2014 Sierra DureLife Brake Rotors

They're touting the fact that "GMC also uses a heat-treating process called ferritic nitrocarburizing" in their ads?

I'm thinking that the percentage of people who see that commercial who have even the faintest inkling of what ferritic nitrocarburizing is can be safely rounded down to zero.

In the Heat of the Foundry, Steinway Piano 'Hearts' are Made

NPR reported on the casting of Steinway pianos' iron plates in Springfield, Ohio.

Their story also came with a few photos of two foundry workers pouring the plates by hand and telling a few stories of some of the molten iron running into their wisely-slip-off boots.

Mjölnir (Thor: The Dark World) - MAN AT ARMS

There aren't any new material being used in this video, but there is a guy making the Hammer of THOR!

Or rather a nice recreation of the hammer of the gods.

At about 5:45, though, there is a vulgar word on the shirt of the narrator/creator. Be careful if you're planning on showing this in class, folks.

Proteq Starpath

I'll admit to being intrigued by this material, a coating that apparently phosphoresces throughout the night once the sun goes down.

I do have a few questions, though:

• What's the durability of the coating?
• How inert is it, particularly to surrounding flora and fauna?
• Does the light produced by the Proteq coating cause any problems with nocturnal animals and their navigation/courtship?
• Can I get it in cornflower blue?

Turn your smartphone into a digital microscope!

We're always looking for better and better ways to show microstructures of crystals, metals, anything. Heck, I'm always looking for better ways to show the structure of my fingerprints for that matter.

For years we've used goose-neck cameras and digital microscopes - often from the Ken-a-Vision folks.

Apparently now that we have smart phones, though, we can be just about finished with that old school nonsense.

For under $10 (plus the smartphone), you can build yourself a digital microscope.

I currently have one of my students working on one for extra credit. I'll report back one I get it and see how it works.

Full, step-by-step instructions are on Instructables.

Young Scientist Winner - sodium polyacrylate filled 'sandbags'

The greatest inventions seem so obvious after somebody else comes up with them.

Peyton Robertson's sodium-polyacrylate-and-salt-filled 'sandbags' are no different. Of course filling sandbags with sodium polyacrylate is a brilliant idea.

Of course you'd need to add something to increase the density so the bags don't float away.

Of course salt would be the easiest thing to add because it's cheap and can adjust the density of the swollen sandbag easily.

Of course the sodium ions would decrease the swelling of the sodium polyacrylate, so you'd need more sodium polyacrylate.

Of course I never would've come up with this and am absolutely blown away by Peyton's idea.

Check out the rest of the finalists here.

Die forging process (open and closed die)

Forging is dirty. There's no doubt about it, but forging is just so amazing to watch, especially when the scale peels off of the piece as pressure is increased.

This video goes through the advantages for forging (reduce crosssection, improve microstructure, provide directional grain flow, and eliminate porosity of castings), and two types of forging (open die, impression or closed die forging). We get to see multiple steps in the process as well as eventual removal of the flash.

Great intro video, folks. Thanks to Rebecca for passing it along.

Red Hot Nickel Ball Has Finally Met Its Match!

You might not have been know that Red Hot Nickel Ball has its own YouTube channel, but it does.

Well, almost. RHNB has its own playlist of thirty-two videos from among carsandwater's uploaded videos.

Things all got started with a mute, never-appearing user putting the eponymous red hot nickel ball into a cup of water (a demonstration that I love doing - with slight adjustments - in class when I'm introducing thermochemistry in chemistry class) and continues through honey, pop rocks (surprisingly cool to watch), a steak, and - most recently - aerogel.

Man, aerogel is cool.

I wish I had some.

Wait, I did have some.

Until another master teacher broke it.

Which makes me sad...

Mechanical Engineers Discovered How the Arapaima Becomes Piranha-Proof

A recent article in Advanced Engineering Materials that has been reported all over the place on the web looked at the scales of Arapaima gigas, a freshwater fish that lives in the Amazon River and is able to successfully defend itself from the bite of the piranha.

Researchers found that the scales of the arapaima are brilliantly constructed with an incredibly hard, outer and inner, mineralized layers sandwiched around much more flexible, collagen fibers stacked in opposite directions providing a marvelous flexibility.

The video above mentions (at about 0:38) the possibility of extending this concept to produce flexible ceramic materials.

Nature, man, she continues to reveal amazing secrets.

Here are four different reports on the research though the original article is thankfully not behind a subscription wall:

• Jacobs School (where the research is being conducted)
• livescience.com
• sciencemag.org
• neatorama.com

Cutest Corrosion PSA Ever

Yeah, that's about right. It's just about the cutest corrosion PSA ever.

It's also one of the best corrosion introductions I've seen. The kids go through a quick survey of preventing corrosion via galvanic protection, material selection, and coating technologies. They also remind us why corrosion is an important topic to consider when designing any piece of infrastructure - like a pretty nice playground.

And then they play.

Always remember to play at the end of any bit of work.

As an aside, the PSA is technically for an exhibit at the Orlando Science Center. I happen to remember that one of our campers at the corrosion mini-camp at Akron in the late summer 2012 was an exhibit designer for the Orlando Science Center. I wonder...

Where were the ASM Teacher Camps in the summer of 2013?

View ASM Teachers Camps 2013 in a larger map

In case anybody was curious about the geographic spread of the ASM teacher camps as of summer 2013...

Next summer I'm pulling for the Chaminade University...or Portland State...or Northern Arizona University...maybe the University of San Francisco...

Coincidentally, those are places that I really want to visit.

Strength - Toughness

Strength and toughness are two properties that, as the terms are used in the non-scientific world.

Something that is strong must also be tough. They mean the same, right?

To a materials scientist, they most certainly do not. As the linked website defines, 'strength measures the resistance of a material to failure, given the applied stress (or load per unit area)' and 'toughness measures the energy required to crack a material; it is important for things which suffer impact.'

The interactive diagram (called Ashby diagrams) on the linked website graphs the strength vs toughness for a number of materials and finds them grouped with like materials (wood near wood, polymers near polymers, etc). The graph also has some java-based interactivity allowing each group to be further explored.

The site has a number of links at the bottom to similar pages exploring other materials relationships: young's modulus vs cost, strength vs cost, and a dozen more.

PS - Thanks to Todd for finding this site and to Caryn for passing it along.

Mini Materials Camp

Each time there is an MS&T conference, the ASM folks try to be there to run a mini-materials camp. The ASM folks invite local teachers to bring their classes (sometimes even paying for transportation) and see some of the glory that is materials science.

This series of videos shows the process of casting tin using a microwave oven. The process of sand casting is fascinating to watch and still an important industrial process.

The process is broken up into five parts - the remaining four of which are after the jump.

Today's post finishes with another demonstration from the mini-materials camp: the phase change of iron wire.

The mini camps aren't nearly a replacement for the week-long summer camps, but they're great ways to expose your students to materials science if you happen to be lucky enough to be in the area of an MS&T conference - like the Indianapolis folks are this fall (September 2013).

How It's Made Giant Tires

Where's the corny joke at the beginning?

I'm glad to see that some recycled tire rubber is used in this production. It's interesting to hear the mixture ingredients that go into the rubber - sulfur, carbon black, rubber, antioxidants, and apparently the bags that the carbon black and sulfur come in.

All of the by-hand working in the making of the tire makes me understand why it's so expensive. This one's a pretty impressive process. I think I counted about three thousand layers of rubber in the tire.

Sheesh...

And the transformation in the end - via steam-filled bladder - is just stunning.

Oh, there's the corny joke...at the end this time.

World's Roundest Object!

Be careful when discussing this video with your students. This is about the world's roundest sphere...sphere. It's not a ball. It's a sphere.

Just saying.

'Cause I know I've said ball in front of my high school students, and it took me a while to get the boys' attention back.

(In a related aside, my wife is listening in as this video plays. She lost control at 6:22 when the narrator said "Newtons, Joules". To quote her: "heh, heh...Newton's jewels...heh, heh".)

This 'world's roundest object' is more about the basis of our metric (now the systemé international d'unités or SI) than it is about materials science. There are, however, some serious challenges involved in making a material that won't decompose, that won't get dirty, that won't wear away, that won't change over time.

Here they have created - according to the scientist at 7:25 - a single crystal of silicon with 'no voids or dislocations' and containing only one isotope of silicon, making the material just slightly less valuable than absolutely, perfectly, priceless.

Science Lowers Shattering Risk at Home Plate

Image source

From the New York Times...

Welington Castillo smashed a double for the Chicago Cubs late in a game in the 2010 season, his bat exploding on impact with the ball. A long shard of wood flew at a teammate, Tyler Colvin, sprinting home from third base, impaling him a few inches from his heart. Though Colvin scored, his season was over.

That's not Welington Castillo or Tyler Colvin there to the right. That's Hanley Ramirez breaking his bat in a game June 19, 2013. The video of the Tyler Colvin incident can be found on YouTube, though.

I grew up just a few miles from the Hillerich & Bradsby Louisville Slugger factory in Jeffersonville, Indiana, so I can vouch that we've been using wooden baseball bats since at least April, 1975 (and probably longer than that). It would seem like there wouldn't be much room for improvement in wooden bat technology. Sure there are composite bats and aluminum bats and carbon fiber bats, but those aren't for the big leagues. The big leaguers use wooden bats, and wood is wood. It grows, we cut it, we shape it.



In the early 2000's, however, traditional ash bats began to give way to maple bats, favored most famously by Barry Bonds. The maple bats felt harder, stronger, more powerful - perhaps truthfully, perhaps in an example of placebo effect. The important aspect for this article is that maple bats didn't just shatter; they exploded.

Hence the room for materials science, finding a way to make a better maple bat.

Magnetic Mysteries of Earth's Core

Admittedly the BBC article "Magnetic mysteries of Earth's core" might not, at first blush, seem like a materials article. We can't see, touch, or directly interact with the core. We can't make anything out of the core.

But we can test the core and can - as has Professor Kei Hirose of the article - test the core indirectly. Here Hirosa has recreated the temperature and pressure conditions thought to exist in the inner core, using a diamond-tipped vice to exert 3,000,000 atmospheres of pressure on a nickel-iron alloy being simultaneously heated to 4500 C.

At these conditions crystals within the alloy changed and apparently increased to drastic sizes, leading Hirose to propose that the core may include crystals up to 10km in size.

Researchers turn cement into metal

Close-up visualizations of (A) the HOMO and (B) LUMO single-particle electron states in the 64CaO glass. Both states are spin-degenerate, and h1 labels the cavity (cage) occupied by LUMO. Yellow and magenta stand for different signs of the wave-function nodes. (C) Simulation box and the electron spin-density of the 64CaO glass with one oxygen subtracted at h2—that is, with two additional electrons. The two electrons have the same spin and they occupy separate cavities, h1 (boundary, also shown in B) and h2 (center, location of removed oxygen), which are separated by 12 Å from each other. (D) Cage structure around the spin-density of one electron cor- responding to the h2 cavity (close-up from C). Al, gray; Ca, green; O, red. Credit: ANL

I'll readily admit that the science behind this article, summarizing an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is at the edge of my understanding of materials.

Apparently the scientists turned liquid cement into a semi-conductor analogous to liquid metal and eventually to a metallic-glass material, something that could lead to "positive attributes including better resistance to corrosion than traditional metal, less brittleness than traditional glass, conductivity, low energy loss in magnetic fields, and fluidity for ease of processing and molding."

The process seems to so obvious that I'm disappointed I didn't think of it myself:

The team of scientists studied mayenite, a component of alumina cement made of calcium and aluminum oxides. They melted it at temperatures of 2,000 degrees Celsius using an aerodynamic levitator with carbon dioxide laser beam heating. The material was processed in different atmospheres to control the way that oxygen bonds in the resulting glass. The levitator keeps the hot liquid from touching any container surfaces and forming crystals. This let the liquid cool into glassy state that can trap electrons in the way needed for electronic conduction

Seriously, though, can anybody explain this to me?

I can say that I know what the HOMO and LUMO shown in the diagram are. Those I remember from college chem.

Ice Axes - How it's Made

I was almost a little disappointed that there wasn't a corny joke at the beginning of this video, and then I found out that ice axes are "really designed for peak performance."

I really wonder if as much of this manufacturing process is down by hand as is being shown here.

How It's Made Swords

"...and they go to the hilt to make sure the details are just right."

Seriously?

Ok, if all they're doing is making replica swords, I can see that just cutting it out of a block of metal would be faster, but it can't have nearly the same strength and flexibility that a real sword would.

I'm thinking most of this sword making procedure isn't quite historically accurate, but I will admit that most of my knowledge of sword making comes from Highlander.

Science camp: Living in a materials world

This video is of the Howard University ASM teachers materials camp in the summer of 2012.

The video was filmed and published by Stars & Stripes, a YouTube channel that (in their words) "exists to provide independent news and information to the U.S. military community, comprising active-duty, DoD civilians, contractors, and their families."

It's a fairly standard format: ASM official (Charles Hayes) speaks, labs are shown being done, teacher attendee describes a lab. The only thing missing was a teacher attendee giving a testimonial about the camp.

I particularly loved seeing the borax glass drop (at 0:48) pick up more borax that starts to degas and puff up.

Water and Solutions -- for Dirty Laundry: Crash Course Chemistry #7

Thank you, John Green.

This thirteen-and-a-half-minute-long video covers enough chemistry about water that if my students understood the entire video by the end of my year of chemistry, I would be pretty happy.

Because it's that saturated with knowledge, I don't know that I'd necessarily show it in one sitting in the classroom. It's dense, man, but it does a spectacular job explaining (and showing via animation) a whole lot of ideas about the chemistry of water. I'll list some of them...

• oxidizing (like bleach and hydrogen peroxide do)
• solutions (aqueous ones)
• solute
• solvent
• polar molecules
• polar and nonpolar molecules dissolving each other
• water dissolving ionic compounds
• electrolytes
• strong, weak, and non-
• moles
• concentration
• molarity
• molality 
• diluting

Magic Molecule by Christopher Chapman & Hugh O'Connor,

Man, the '60's, huh?

Throw in the fact that these filmmakers are Canadian, and you have an absolutely perfect recipe for weirdness.

This video - available online thanks to the National Film Board of Canada - certainly is weird and dated, but it makes for a pretty impressive overview of what the dreams of a plastic world used to be.

Nowadays the world of plastics tends to be viewed with a far more environmentally-suspicious lens than the one through which our intrepid polymerist gazes at 2:00, but in the 1960's, everything was coming up plastics.

I do believe that at 5:40, we have a composite.

And I just love the opening poem...

It's a fine phenolic, acrylic day.

The cellusoics are in good fettle, and there's a hint of melamine in the air.

Yes, everything is perfectly synthetic, for this is the bright, new world of plastic products.

...and the cool shorts outfit at 1:28...

...and the beautiful world of 7:04...

...and the Legos from 7:20 through 7:40...

...and the boat of 7:50...

Hey, what happened to the old dude at 7:50? Where'd he go?

PS: Thanks to Kristin for the find here. As always, if you find a great materials science video, feel free to send it my way.

Jeep Grand Cherokee Manifesto Commercial

First off, the song is "God's Gonna Cut You Down" as performed by Johnny Cash. The video starring just about everybody but Cash is over here if you want to hear the whole song.

I knew you wanted to know.

The video - one-minute long - is officially an advertisement for a Jeep, but it uses patriotism and transfer about the great manufacturing history of America to make you think that if we made great things here once, the Jeep must be one of those things.

Which it might be, but that's not our point.

For me, the video is a nice, emotional call-out to return to manufacturing greatness, something that materials science just might help us do.

How It's Made Steel Forgings

The jokes just never stop coming from How It's Made. Their opening jokes are as corny as Kansas in August.

Our Tuscaloosa camp got to see an electric arc furnace at work at Nucor Steel. If ever you get the chance, do not miss seeing one of those at work. They're stunning and absolutely awesome.

The glowing blocks at 2:45 would be amazing to see in person, as would the forging press at 3:00. Wow...

How honeycombs can build themselves

Image source - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/17/honeycombs-build-themselves-physics-bees_n_3611825.html

A recent article in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface explored the physical reasons behind the creation of the classic beehive hexagons, whether they were intentionally created by the bees to be hexagons or whether the hexagons arose naturally from the physical forces at work within the beehive.

Apparently in this case physics beats biology...

Karihaloo and his colleagues seem to have clinched this argument with their study. The team interrupted honeybees making a comb by smoking them out of the hive, and found that the most recently built cells have a circular shape, whereas those just a little older have developed into hexagons. The authors say that the worker bees that make the comb knead and heat the wax with their bodies until it reaches about 45 ^oC — warm enough to flow like a viscous liquid.

Stupid physics...

2012 Eisenman Materials Camp Lab

This video - published on ASM's YouTube channel - takes a quick tour of the Eisenman Materials Science camp, ASM's longest ongoing summer student camp. Since this camp was first run more than a decade ago now, the program has expanded to more than twenty-five student camp around the country.

The camps are largely run by volunteers and see the students broken up into five- and six-student teams who then work on a single project for the week under the supervision of an industry mentor/expert. It makes for a spectacular introduction to the world of materials science for the students who get to attend.

Check out the full camp schedule and start thinking about which of your students should be attending these entirely free camps.

ASM Materials Camp 2012

I kinda wish I would've gotten to go to an ASM materials camp when I was a high school student. I'm thinking that if I had, I might've ended up heading down a different path.

Not that I don't love my job now. I do love it. Especially if my principal happens to stumble upon this blog. I love my job and my boss.

This video gives a glimpse into the week-long student summer materials camps. In the camps the students are broken into small (five- or six-student) groups and spend the week exploring an group-specific problem. Along the way, the whole group comes together for some materials instruction and a few activities - like the forging going on under the tent above. It's a very different set-up from the teacher camps and one that lets the students be even more hands on.

The above video captures some highlights from and interviews at the Eisenman Materials Science camp that takes place each summer at the ASM headquarters in Materials Park, OH - one of more than twenty student camps each summer. Check out the full camp schedule on the ASM foundation website.

Training Camp for Science Teachers

Image source - http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i21/Training-Camp-Science-Teachers.html

The summer of 2012 saw a number of new teacher camps as the ASM Foundation continued to expand the materials science teacher camps to a larger and larger audience. One of the new camps was held at the University of Indianapolis, and we (I taught the camp that year with Becky Heckman) were lucky enough to get a pop-in from Mitch Jacoby from Chemical & Engineering News. Mitch's article took a few months to find its way into print, but the article is well worth a read.

I am particularly happy about the last few paragraphs...

ASM’s data show that of the roughly 4,000 “graduates” over the past 10 years, about 60% of whom teach high school chemistry, more than 80% incorporate some of the camp activities into their teaching.

Marilyn Weiss, who teaches Advanced Placement and other chemistry classes at Park Tudor Upper School in Indianapolis, says she includes many of the lessons she learned at the camp last summer. Examples include exercises on metal plating and electrochemistry, as well as experiments on the properties of metals and alloys and physical differences between two polymers.

In addition to picking up valuable teaching techniques, Tracy Schloemer, a 10th-grade chemistry teacher at Denver School of Science & Technology, says she made great contacts at the camp last summer. “As a teacher, I find networking can be tough. The ASM camp enabled me to meet a diverse crowd of teachers and academic faculty.” Schloemer gives the camp a thumbs-up and is quick to recommend it to colleagues. “It’s free, and you get plenty of stuff to use in the classroom. Why wouldn’t you want to go?”

Thanks for the good coverage, Mitch

One order of steel; hold the greenhouse gases

Image source - http://www.petrodrillingtools.com/factory.asp?bigclassname=factory&smallclassname=Steel-making

Stepping into a steel mill is like walking into the gates of hell. I can't possibly describe my feelings when I toured the Nucor plant in Tuscaloosa, AL this summer any more clearly.

I don't mean to say that the plant tour was bad or unpleasant, it was far from those. Instead, it was one of the most fascinating industrial settings that I have ever, ever seen. Instead, the heat and fire and sparks and glowing light could only be analogous to our cultural images of eternal damnation in hellfire.

...and it's apparently bad for our environment, something else I got to see in Provo, Utah, when I saw the remnants of Geneva Steel, a cleanup that has been ongoing for more than twenty years.

But I digress...

Today's article - from the MIT website - reports on a paper in the journal Nature titled "A new anode material for oxygen evolution in molten oxide electrolysis". The paper describes a new process of steel making that promises to produce higher quality steel at a cheaper cost and with less carbon dioxide production. Instead of using a carbon to chemically reduce iron ore (producing carbon dioxide as greenhouse-effect-worsening byproduct), the described process initially used an iridium anode but finally settled on a chromium/iron alloy which is, according to researcher Donald Sadoway, is "abundant and cheap."

The connections to our summer workshop are all over the place...

• oxidation happening more quickly at high temperatures ("about 1600 degrees Celsius")
• chemical reduction via the activity series (carbon used to reduce iron oxides)
• electrolytic reduction at the anode
• protective oxide coatings (like aluminum's) on the iron/chromium alloy anode
• ceramics and some metals having much higher melting points than others
• interdisciplinary approach to science ("Electrochemistry is a multidisciplinary problem, involving chemical, electrical[,] and materials engineering.")

It's a great read.

How It's Made - Fiber Cement Siding

I can say that I am a homeowner of a home covered in fiber cement board, specifically HardiePanels.

At 1:03 the video says that water is pumped into the pulverized sand to 'liquify' the sand. Really? In my head, liquify means melting. The sand clearly isn't melting, but it is coming together into a slurry. Is the word liquify being used correctly there?

Production of the cement fiber boards here are conceptually simple - sand, cement, wood fiber, water - but impressively complex in processing, particularly the use of pressurized steam to speed up the cement curing process.

What Stresses Gorilla Glass Makes It Stronger

Image source - http://www.connectedrogers.ca/news/ask-an-expert-gorilla-glass/

In a journal article for Physical Review Letters, Thomas Voigtmann and his colleagues explored the reasons why glass retains a 'memory' of its production process when the glass hardens, something that we touch upon in the summer workshops when we talk about tempered glass (as especially well explained in the Prince Rupert's drops video - previously blogged about here).

I appreciate the comment in the summary article from InsideScience.org that states that

Voigtmann and his coauthors describe glass's residual stress in physics terms, by observing how the motion of individual atoms affects the entire complex system. But engineers are already taking advantage of glass's history dependence—no theoretical physics required.

The article goes on to explain the process of producing Gorilla Glass - hardening in a bath of molten potassium salts - and why this produces a remarkably hard, durable glass.

ASM International Headquarters Renovation Projects

This video - only 1:39 long - shows a slide show of the background and accomplishments involved in the renovation of the ASM headquarters in Materials Park, OH. I'll readily admit that I absolutely love getting to visit the ASM headquarters each year for our master teacher training in April.

If you're a member of ASM, make sure to stop by if you're ever in the Cleveland area.

ASM International Headquarters

ASM's headquarters in Materials Park, OH, was built in 1959 as a cutting-edge architectural marvel. This video does a great job recapping a very quick history of the building and some of the renovations that were necessary by the turn of the century.

Princeton materials Science Camp for Teachers

That's a pretty fair description of the ASM summer camp from Dan Steinberg...

This is a five-day, intensive camp to teach materials science to materials science teacher taught by master teachers and Princeton professors.

Brian Wright, seen at 0:25 and again at 0:49, has been teaching the Princeton camp for a number of years. It's great to see an ASM volunteer, a Princeton professor, and a whole lot of excited teacher campers.

This video is a well-produced, fairly slick promo video about the Princeton summer ASM camp.

How It's Made Hammers

"No one-hit wonder"...funny stuff here...

I love the simplicity - in general appearance, anyway - of forging...and the fire that flares from the oil quenching at 2:20...

Ok, in reality, these look like really nice hammers, especially the ones with the resin-dipped leather handles.

"They've really nailed it"...still funny...

Anybody know who writes these How It's Made scripts?

Clips from PCCM's 1st Materials Camp for Teachers

I wish I had one of those maroon polo shirts. In our program the number of different color polo shirts is a little bit of a badge of honor. The more colors, the longer a teacher has been part of the program. I'll admit to having a geeky pleasure when I could go a full five days without repeating any colors this summer. Take that, Becky!

This isn't any sort of finished product. It's a bunch of barely edited clips from PCCM's - Princeton Center for Complex Materials - first ever summer materials science camp for teachers, probably from 2004. Most of the clips are of camper teachers giving remarks toward the end of the camp.

It's interesting to see some of the older ways that we did the labs - piling cement blocks on the concrete bars for destructive testing. Through the years the labs have certainly been refined, as has the whole curriculum.

It's good to hear many of the same compliments from the camper teachers that we still hear - that applied knowledge is more important than theory without application, the materials for the activities are cheap, demonstrations with explanations are powerful, the information is relateable for both upper- and lower-level students, and that the summer workshop is the best workshop they'd ever been to.

Mississippi Mornings #2 6-10-2013

Good morning!




Friday at Meridian High School was apparently a little crowded as this is the second report broadcast and recorded while the campers were measuring Young's modulus.

Great job from camper Perry Buxton reminding us that students need to do things instead of just practicing for the state tests.

Teachers Using Everyday Objects to Teach

It's always good to get a some good press for the local teachers and organizers of one of our ASM summer teacher camps. It's not always as much fun to be asked to explain the camp to reporters in a few soundbites.

Todd, however, did a nice job when the Meridian press stopped by on Friday during the June 2013 teachers camp at Meridian High School in Meridian, MS to put together the above report, interviewing one camper and one master teacher and showing the campers measuring Young's modulus on composite day.

In a neat turn, the camp didn't have any spot plates for the bismuth-tin alloy lab (to demonstrate the eutectic point). The master teachers improvised and finally landed on the solution shown at 1:00 in the video: plaster of Paris molds using Whoppers for the forms. According to Caryn Jackson, they first tried glass beads (like those found in a Pente game) and grapes before settling on the Whoppers. Apparently the Whoppers also had the benefit of leaving a little wax/chocolate coating behind that seemed to ease the spots' journey out of the molds.

Nice save, Todd, Tom, and Caryn.

Teachers head back to school in Tuscaloosa

In June of 2013 channel 42 out of Birmingham, AL stopped by the University of Alabama's ASM summer teacher camp and produced the above video and this story for their newscast and website.

It's not a huge part, but it does show a quick glimpse of the campers doing NACE lab #2 - Mr. Copper and Miss Sulfate.

Having been in Alabama when this was filmed, I can successfully say that the campers did successfully develop the activity series.

Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries a boost for electronics

Either the Borg are about to assimilate that yellow cube, or we've got a new type of battery on our hands.

The article - from the University of Illinois's news bureau - summarizes research published in the April 16, 2013 issue of the journal Nature Communications under the far more technical title "[h]igh-power lithium ion microbatteries from interdigitated three-dimensional bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes".

 To summarize (enough to whet your whistle)...

With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly.

The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale.

The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance.

Maybe supercapicitors aren't the answer after all...

Al 3anany Science Cement.flv

Wait, wait, wait - from 3:00 - "the powder goes into a preheater. The temperature of the powder is eighty degrees Celsius upon entering. Within forty seconds, it gets more than ten times hotter."

That's problematic to this old chemistry teacher. Does that mean it's up to 800 C (80 C x 10)? or 3530 K (353 K x 10)? If I've learned nothing else from the gas laws chapter, it's that if we're talking about doubling temperature, we'd better be talking about absolute temperature.

In spite of the atrocious largely gibberish title, this is a How It's Made video about cement. The video covers initial limestone blasting (open pit mining, I guess), rock crushing, mixing to reach the right proportion of calcium carbonate, bonding the minerals together  and degassing (carbon dioxide release, anybody?) them via heat, and final grinding.

And then...and then...and then...

Sorry, the hypnotic motion of the grinding balls got me there for a second.

Where was I?

The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis

The eureka moment described here feels a whole lot like the moment in Primer where Abe slides the car batteries out of the way. (What do you mean, you haven't seen Primer yet? Close this window and go watch it immediately.)

Batteries work...sort of...

Capacitors - specifically supercapicitors - may, however, just end up being a far more effective means of energy storage, something that we are desperately in need of as we make the - hopeful - shift from fossil fuels to renewables, some of which (solar, wind) are very much problematic in their ability to provide round the clock energy production.

Could capacitors be the solution?

Man invents machine to convert plastic into oil

This is our second video from the Our World series, exploring radical solutions to some of our greatest technological problems. Here we see a Japanese scientist who is looking to solve the problem of how to dispose of our huge amounts of petroleum-based, plastic trash.

I want to know what 'gas' he's speaking of at 2:00.

...and how long the processing of 1kg of plastic takes...

...how much energy has to be put into the machine to heat the plastic as compared to the energy density of the oil that comes out...

...if the process is scalable...

...why we aren't using this process already...

Nova: Secrets of the Samurai Sword

From tip to tail, this one's worth showing in full. I know I can't quite make it in one of our periods (48 minutes last year, no guess how long this year), but it would be well worth two days. Brilliant stuff combining art, science, history, so much. Wow.

New video posted as of 7/30/14 - All times should be modified by subtracting about 20 seconds. For example, 11:30 listed below is more like 11:10 in this video.

My highlights...

• 11:30 - switching from BCC to FCC iron, paralleling the iron wire demo and showing how steel forms from the iron
• 12:45 - Thoe Gray's tour of the periodic table (love his book, app, poster, all of it)
• 15:00 - Charpy hardness testing explanation - toughness vs hardness
• 22:00 - The breaking up of the furnace is just gorgeous to watch...brilliant and blinding and beautiful. Wow...
• 23:00-25:30 - Could be skipped if need be, compares Japanese samurai films to American westerns
• 31:10 - cold working, work hardening of copper and how that relates to crystal defects in the sword
• 33:30-36:00 - Also could be skipped as it doesn't cover any science, just showing us how impressive the swords and swordsmen are.
• 36:40 - Differences in types of steel - high- and low-carbon steel - and how they are combined to make a better sword
• 40:50 - Heat treating, quenching and what it does to high- and low-carbon steels
• 44:00 - Differential thermal expansion, like a bimetallic strip
• 45:30-47:00 - Skippable...how to use the sword properly in fighting

Man, great stuff.

Real World: Space Shuttle Thermal Protection System

This video, produced by NASA, may not be quite as stunning as some of the other space shuttle tile videos, but it does a nice job explaining why the tiles are needed, how they're made, and what the other options are.

Oh, and I know my quote source here is Wikipedia, but I've read in a number of places that the explanation of friction being the cause of heating of the shuttle (and other objects) upon reentry to the atmosphere is incorrect. Rather, most of the heating is due to compression of the air.

Direct friction upon the reentry object is not the main cause of shock-layer heating. It is caused mainly from isentropic heating of the air molecules within the compression wave. Friction based entropy increases of the molecules within the wave also account for some heating.

...but Randall Munroe has my back, too...

Things get really hot when they come back from space. This isn’t because of air friction, strictly speaking—it’s because of air compression. The air can’t move out of the way fast enough, and gets squished in front of the spaceship/meteor/steak. Compressing air heats it up. As a rule of thumb, you start to notice compressive heating above about Mach 2 (which is why the Concorde had heat-resistant material on the leading edge of its wings).

Firing Raku Pottery in the Microwave Oven: The Paragon Kiln Operation Series

The Paragon Magic Fuse kiln is available online and from local dealers - there are four within twenty miles on my house. It's only $160 and weighs 5lbs, so I'm guessing the shipping wouldn't be too bad.

There are a few limitations of the kiln - the need for a microwave, the tiny maximum size of the piece being fired - but it is a way for you to do small raku projects without buying a larger kiln.

Plus it's just really frickin' cute!

Five High-Paying, Low-Stress Jobs

It doesn't get much more direct than Monster.com listing Materials Scientist as the #2 highest paying, lowest stress job out there right now.

2. Materials Scientist Median Annual Salary: $90,600

Synthetic fibers, lubricants, leak-proof materials -- these are a few of the products created by materials scientists. They need strong chemistry backgrounds and at least a bachelor’s degree to get started. Those holding a PhD often specialize in areas such as analytical chemistry or polymer chemistry.

That's the kind of fact that should be plastered on a t-shirt.

ASARCO - How It's Made: Copper

Aw, man...this video says it's 14:30 long, but the last five minutes is a repeat of the middle five minutes. The real video ends at 9:38.

Getting to that 9:38, though, is some impressive information about the mining and refining of copper.

Rock is exploded and strip mined...leached with sulfuric acid...electrochemically refined...or pulverized...turned into slurry and concentrated...mixed with silica flux and smelted...

The whole video is brilliantly informational, and the green flames - first appearing at 5:14 and reappearing a number of times, most brilliantly at 5:30 - are absolutely stunning.

Heck, the opportunity to see the shimmering, reflective, molten copper at 5:40 alone is worth the price of admission.

The video's original source is the ASARCO website...

http://www.asarco.com/about-us/our-locations/asarco-mineral-discovery-center/making-copper/

...and was uploaded to YouTube so it could be embedded here. The entirety of the ASARCO website has some great information about the copper refining process - images, diagrams, explanation, outstanding stuff. And, yes, the video is mirrored left-to-right, but the process is still shown clearly.

College Student Invents Building Material

It looks like Micah has taken down his blog - at least I can't find it via any of the search terms I could see at 1:39 in the video. He has, however, gone on to found Pulse Motors, an electric bicycle start-up - more about that here, here, and here.

It's always interesting in camp and in class to expand (see, I'm funny) on the uses of the expandable foam. There's the standard Great Stuff foam, expanding foam insulation, and Nerf, but what else is there to the foams?

Now there's making a building material out of them...in Pittsburgh, anyway.

Quick question, though, what's with the density currents above the container at 0:02 and again 4:55? Does the stuff cure faster with a heat gun treatment? Gotta try that sometime...

Pykrete - collecting videos

Pie-crete (sp?)...Mythbusters



In an earlier post, we saw a video go through the history of pykrete, a composite of wood pulp (or sawdust in some reports) and ice. The materials was championed by - and named for - a British inventor named Geoffrey Pyke.

When I brought up the material in class one year, a student mentioned that Mythbusters had done an episode on the feasibility of using pykrete as a boat-building material. Since I couldn't find the full episode online, I thought I'd post all the clips I could find - from Mythbusters and two other television shows exploring pykrete.

And I don't want to hear any snotty comments about Mythbusters.

Raku Pottery

I love watching potters work. Sure, just beat the snot out of that clay square and roll it on through a pasta machine. Later, smack it a while with a wooden spoon. Yup...pottery!

Admittedly the first 3:40 or so of this video is just watching clay getting formed, not that sciency or exciting. Then the furnace opens up, and they reach in with just gloves (at 4:30) to reload the kiln. Sheesh...

And finally, at 9:20, we get to see the finished products...so pretty.

High-tech cement for extreme tasks - TUM-chair for construction materials

Concrete is almost always a solid choice.

(Sorry...)

The video seems to use the terms concrete and cement fairly interchangeably. I know they're not the same (cement being a component of concrete), but I'll admit to making the same mistake myself quite frequently.

This might be a good video to show somewhere along the way with the cement hockey pucks lab as they use various additives with cement to change the properties of the cement pretty drastically, making the cement easier to pump, slower setting, better able to retain water, or more resistant to pressure or CO₂.

By the way, in the fluidity test, does the reddish additive (shown being measured at 3:49) really say Magic Compound on the paper (see 3:55)?

Material Marvels with Ainissa Ramirez - Shape Memory Alloys

Those Lego figures stuck to the boards are ones I'm trying to collect. I have the wolfman, but I need all the rest. Wonder is Ainissa would send them my way.
Ainissa actually does a great job explaining why the memory alloy switches back and forth as temperature is raised - at least at a low level of explanation - at 2:20, explaining that the material switches from monoclinic to cubic crystal structures.

Space Shuttle Thermal Tile Demonstration

Yeah, but twenty-two hundred degrees for hours...but is that celsius or fahrenheit?

Wussies...

The move at 1:20 sums up my thoughts. Check the very shaky hands, man.

Railroad thermite welding

There are just no words.

I mean, really, this video has no words what so ever.

What it does have is...at 0:15 a thermite mixture placed on a heated form...at 0:23 an ignitor lit and placed in the mixture...at 0:28 a controlled hell breaking loose, peaking at about 0:35...molten iron leaking into the form at 0:45 (I think)...an awesome sound at 0:48...or maybe molten iron leaking at 0:50...I have no idea what the yellow thing does at 2:05...still glowing iron being cleaned up at 2:45...and big grinding at 3:30.

And that's what thermite is used for.

Concrete: A slightly tongue-in-cheek look

That's a big piece of sewer pipe. It's kind of weird that it's in sharper focus than is the rest of the frame, though.

The Engineer Guy makes some concrete - apparently from quickcrete - and then waits for it to set while his sample cures.

At 1:45 he says that concrete doesn't really dry and explains what's really happening. Then, though, at 2:05 he says he's going to wait for the concrete to dry. Sheesh...

Copper: The Miracle Metal

The sound is all out of whack here, but if you hang around for the outtakes at the end of the concrete video, you can see why they had to use such extensive overdubbing.

I do dig the smooth slide to the right at 1:33.

Copper's five properties are - in case you missed them...

1. inert to water
2. easily shaped
3. plays friendly with other metals
4.    
5. 100% recyclable   

 ...or maybe they're...

1. easily shaped
2. conducts electricity
3. tolerates heat
4.   
5.   

I totally agree with The Engineer Guy in everything he said about copper. It's very cool.

But I might like things to be a little more linear when he's listing five things.

How a lead-acid battery works

Batteries are just so freakin' cool.

I had no idea the specific chemistry inside a lead-acid battery. Lead plus lead oxide making lead sulfate in each case...brilliant.

The comment at 3:00 - "with most engineered objects, there are going to be trade-offs, giving away the characteristics you want to gain others you must have" - is a marvelous summary of much of our design challenges.

Light bulb filament

This video, made to accompany an article on Wired magazine's website, absolutely blows me away. First off, the ease with which The Engineer Guy takes off the glass envelope of the light bulb at 0:45 is stunning. Can anybody recreate that with a pipe cutter? I've been trying for a couple of weeks with absolutely no luck.

At 0:58 then, the video does a great zoom in on the supercoiled tungsten filament and shows the original 20-inch filament coiled then coiled again.

The next part of the video - from 1:30 through 2:30 - explores the ductility of tungsten and the processes necessary to make it ductile. The six steps - at 2:00 - absolutely blow my mind. That anybody could ever figure those steps out is amazing.

And the video closes with explaining the need for the glass envelope and the gas within.

Great, great video!

Tempered Glass Breakage

I'm always impressed with the surprising strength of tempered glass - and the willingness of people on YouTube to do stupid things without gloves.

When we discuss the strength of tempered glass in our summer workshops, occasionally a camper will ask why we would use such glass as a cutting board. If a nick on the edge (or especially the corner) leads to spectacular failure, why would be take a knife and go at the surface of the glass?

Because this video. That's why.

Extreme Boating

Randall Munroe - of xkcd fame - continues to explore scientifically interesting if perhaps thoroughly unpractical questions at his what if blog.

A recent post asked - and answered - "What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? What about bromine? Liquid gallium? Liquid tungsten? Liquid nitrogen? Liquid helium?"

The first and last questions - mercury and helium - get by far the lengthiest explanations with the general conclusions being that mercury would be barely feasible and helium would be deadly but at least musically so.

Along the way, I learned a lot about why rowing on bromine would be horribly unpleasant, the melting point of tungsten, and about the reactivity of liquid nitrogen.

Thanks, Randall.

XY Wire Drawing Machine Video 1

The consistent tone and repetitive sounds make this a perfect video to doze off to.

The idea is simple enough. A spool of wire is fed through a lubricator then through a draw plate. The wire is then rewound and the process repeated.

I recommend starting the video at about 2:20 so that you can watch the full process from beginning to end. Pay particular attention to the speed of the first spool as compared to the successive speeds - especially the final one.

Mars on Earth: Eco disaster in Hungary after red aluminum toxic sludge

Chris, a chemistry teacher from Ottawa, CA and our shadow in Houston, spoke about aluminum purification when we talked about the labs from the National Association of Corrosion Engineers. One of the labs sees the students placing aluminum strips - from a pop can - into various solutions: cola, water, vinegar, HCl, NaOH, CuSO₄. It's the more concentrated (2M) acid (HCl) andbase (NaOH) that are relevant to the video posted below.

According to Chris - and backed up by a Wikipedia article on bauxite processing - the bauxite is heated with sodium hydroxide solution. This dissolves the aluminum (since it's amphoteric, meaning it will dissolve in both acids and bases) but not the iron compounds present. The iron doesn't dissolve and creates what is industrially known as red mud. This red mud is highly basic (pH between 10 and 14 - 13 in the incident mentioned below) and all but impossible to dispose of. So the red mud - or red sludge, more prosaically - is kept in huge holding ponds...just waiting...for...um...yeah...

In 2010 a holding pond of 35.3 million cubic feet (1 billion liters, 8.4 million barrels, 264 million gallons) of the red sludge broke free from a holding pond in Hungary and covered 16 square miles, initially as a six-foot high wave of the sludge. The flooding was worst along and into the Marcal River and eventually into the Danube.


Here are three more articles related to the accident in Hungary...

• Wikipedia
• NPR
• BBC

...and some pictures...

How a used bottle becomes a new bottle in 6 gifs

NPR posted a story on how a used [glass] bottle becomes a new [glass] bottle. The article is largely a summary or transcript of the below video (it autoplays, I warn you). The video shows the full process from mixed recyclable material coming into the plant to fully formed, 20-25% recycled material glass bottles leaving the plant.

The coolest part for me is the dropping of the hot globs into the forming machines at 2:10. Hot glass is just such a magical material.

And we clearly need to do better at recycling glass...sheesh...

Tempered Glass Tests

"Breaking stuff for the sake of curiosity makes me happy."

Yup...

I had a camper in Provo this past week offer up a 4'x8' sheet of tempered glass for us to break. Seems like he had three of the sheets unused in his living room, there from a previous owner. The camper decided better of the breaking, though, but did promise to film, post, and share the video if he ever got around to breaking the sheet himself at a later date.

In this video Jason Patric our host throws a baseball, hits a golf ball, and finally shoots a metal bb at the glass to finally break the sheet. At 3:40 then the video explains why the tempered glass is so strong. In the end the host takes a tiny hammer to the edge of the sheet.

Amazing bead chain experiment in slow motion - Slo Mo #19 - Earth Unplugged

The beaded polymer chain demonstration - from Educational Innovations - is one of our go-to demonstrations in the summer, year one workshops. In all honesty, though, I think it's a better demonstration of kinetic and potential energy, momentum, and acceleration.

Sure, it's a long chain, and so are most polymers, but if that's all we're showing, then we wouldn't need the mug or the running of the chain out from that mug.

EAF Tapping Camera

 

Video updated - new source - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78CBUcGtfOs

I'm going to let Michael Smith describe this incident...from his Google+ page...

Many of your know that I work at a steel mill and here one example from the video below of the dangers we face daily.  The West Camera shows the danger to workers from the explosion.  If you watch carefully on the EAF Tapping Camera, you can see the water bottle get thrown into the ladle causing the explosion.

The root cause of the incident was a partially filled water bottle was thrown into the ladle just after tapping and must have gone below the surface of the steel very quickly. We are very lucky that no one was injured, and it’s difficult to see but we had one of our operators on the sump (at the top of the stairs) at the time of the explosion.  The 2 views are the tapping camera and then the view from the camera at the LMF which gives you a perspective of the size of the explosion.

I'm curious about the second view that he mentions, because the post has only one video posted, but I'll look around for that later.

Nothing much happens for the first twenty five or so second, then a water bottle is thrown in from the right, and everything goes the H-E-double-hockey-sticks.

I spoke to a former steel mill engineer (not at this mill) about this incident, and her explanation was that the water turned to water vapor - with accompanying volume increase. A different metallurgist, however, said he thought that the heat of the molten steel caused the steelto grab the oxygen from the water, leaving behind explosive hydrogen.

Either way, it's further proof that I do not want to work in a steel mill.

Copper In Our Electrical World

I'm thinking that there is a better way to take those electronic devices (2:30) apart than just bashing at them with various hammers. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

I'd never really thought about the process through which copper deposits are made, and this video covers the chemistry from 3:30-5:00. From there we get to follow the copper from deposit to purified copper - through hydrometalurgical processing (purifying the copper via aqueous solutions - 5:15-8:30) and pyrometalurgical processing (heat, smelting - 8:40-11:30). The level of detail in each process is marvelous as are the animations used to show what happens in each step along the way. We even get a discussion of hydrophobic and hydrophilic effects at 9:30.

I had no idea of the numerous steps along the way from ore to pure metal.

The video moves onward to (11:40- ) to an exploration of why copper is used - relatively low cost, good conductivity, durability - so commonly throughout our industrial world. These properties are explored through the crystal structure (grains, boundaries, etc) of the copper crystals.

From 13:40 onward the uses of copper - wires, electromagnets, antennas and wireless, integrated circuits - are covered.

The video is a little long, but there is a degree's worth of science covered in the eighteen minutes here.

How Does Optical Fibre Work

Silly British professor spelled fiber wrong.

Total internal reflection seems a simple enough concept, but to envision is causing the light signal to bounce down and down and down a flexible, glass rod effectively into infinity is a little harder to imagine. Here a British professor explains the concept of total internal reflection as it works along an optical fiber (or fibre for the Brits).

Miracle mix looks like liquid but shatters like glass

This video - from a New Scientist article - shows the impact of a "300-gram, tungsten carbide rod into the [thin film of] oobleck" at a drastically slowed-down pace. The first thirty-six seconds of the video show 250 milliseconds of real-time action. What's important is that the impact creates a series of sharp cracks - like glass shattering - before the oobleck returns to 'liquid' and 'heals' itself.

Stiletto Titanium FlatBar

I've mentioned before that I need to get my hands on a titanium hammer, but I would certainly settle for a titanium flatbar.

This video takes us from initial sketch to final production, through CAD, SLA (stereo lithography apparatus), casting (I wish we got more of that step, but the titanium hammer video gives us more of that), testing (eventually to failure), and to a cold beverage celebration.

Oil absorption solution

I am continually amazed at the absorbing properties of polymers - whether it's sodium polyacrylate absorbing water or the product shown here absorbing oil and gasoline.

This demonstration of Norsorex (it took a few tries to get the spelling right) is stunning.

Here are a few more, admittedly less stunning and non-narrated videos of - apparently - the same product.

Water is a pretty awful material for building. Yes, it's abundant and cheap. Yes, it can be made opaque or translucent or even pretty transparent. Yes, you can use it to make buildings (like in that totally awesome James Bond movie), but there are a few drawbacks.

It's slightly unstable in the warmer climates. It's vulnerable to destruction from dogs marking the walls. Ice chairs make your hiney all cold.

So this video isn't really about materials, but it is a great background video on the chemistry of water, something that most of our materials run into from time to time.

The chemistry explanations are fairly in-depth (electrolytes, polarity, moles, molarity, anions, and such), so this may not be for all of your students, but it's a great bit if chemistry.

High-tech cement for Extreme Tasks

The cement hockey puck lab allows our students to see how changes in the composition of the cement and additives to the puck construction can make large changes in the strength of the final product.

This video takes that idea further, visiting the lab of a German chemist who is exploring additives to make cement retain water, cure more slowly, flow more easily, and resist chemical degradation from carbon dioxide.

Plus we get to see some really high- and low-tech testing of the cement mixtures. I particularly enjoyed the cone test at 3:20. That's science.

How It's Made Ingine Pistons

I'm kind of amazed that the forging (1:30) is done by hand. The movement of the preheated, prulubed slugs into the press would seem to be very easily done by machine. I'm also a little surprised that the final sanding/smoothing at 4:15 is done by hand as well.

High heat to strengthen the metal then lower heat to stabilize it? That sounds kind of like annealing and tempering.

THE FIRST TRUE ALTERNATIVE to traditional forms of Portland cement

This video isn't the most professionally created, as obvious from the three times that our host welcomes us back and the background hiss.

None of that matters, though, because the claims made in the video are pretty extraordinary. Geo Blue Crete is - according to the video - cheaper (2:20 - 10-20% less than the price of Portland cement), more environmentally friendly (10:10), more steadily priced (2:40), non-toxic (7:10), heat resistant (7:20), chemically inert (8:40), tensile strong in 360 degrees squared (9:20). It's apparently a pretty phenomenal product, and it's endorsed by Reverend Daniel.

I will admit to some skepticism. Extraordinary claims, after all, require extraordinary evidence.

This video makes some pretty extraordinary claims. Can anybody find some evidence for any of them?

Other sources of information

• GeoLodgingNews
• MMD Newswire
• GeoPolymer House Blog
• Mason Contractors

How slow can you flow?

Sci-ence.org strikes again!

Cornstarch and water - non-Newtonian...

Catsup...ketchup (you say potato, I say tomoato, let's call the whole thing a vegetable)...non-Newtonian fluid...

PVA slime...non-Newtonia fluid...

Silly Putty...non-Newtonian fluid...

Chilled caramel topping...non-Newtonian fluid...

Apparently pitch...non-Newtonian fluid...

I've tried the whole "let's put the Silly Putty in a funnel and see what it does," but I've not yet spent eighty-six years watching it drip...drip...c'mon, just frickin' drip!

Feel free to tune in all year long as a ninth drop in those eighty-six years is expected to fall, and the process is viewable streaming online.